I still need to finish Berseria as well. I loved it and Mike even liked spectating, but it was one of those things where it just got so OPEN with side quests near the very end that I just stopped playing because it felt overwhelming. I need to just ignore most of those and beat it to see the ending.

Not sure about altered gameplay for Vesteria but I'm under the impression that it's just an HD remaster of the PS3 version Japan got, so I'm personally guessing that there won't be too many differences.

I have a FULL AND COMPLETE BONER for the re-release of FromSoftware's Metal Wolf Chaos. This is the re-release I didn't know I wanted until now.

For those not in the know: Metal Wolf Chaos is a game where you play as the President of the United States, who drives a giant mech, and is trying to reclaim his presidency after the Vice President (who also drives a giant mech) throws you out in a coup. This came out as a Japan-only Xbox title something like 14 years ago.

Everything about it is cheesy and perfect. Enjoy this summary.

Nintendo better talk about the next mainline Fire Emblem game or I am going to be mad.

That's definitely a game that exists in one of my many blindspots but which I saw a bunch of folks get super excited for. It's super cool to see From going back and revisiting something like that rather than just vanishing further down the Souls hole.

Other than that, two other smaller games that I'm really into are Sable and Tunic.

Shoutout to Japanese Breakfast playing underneath that Sable trailer and I'll be damned if the music for Tunic isn't like a perfect mix of ambient tones bringing back memories of everything from Hyper Light Drifter to Pixeljunk Eden to effin' Persona 1.

cybersix wrote:Nintendo better talk about the next mainline Fire Emblem game or I am going to be mad.

They especially better if I'm expected to be awake at gotdanged 8:45 in the gatdurned AM to watch their garnsung press event. But yeah it should totes be there 'cause it's been like, what, a year and a half since the announcement and nary a peep since. I ain't no fancy big city game developer but that's probablllllllllly enough time to get even a full-scale console Fire Emblem ready to show (especially if they ended up borrowing the graphics engine from Warriors and cooked all the normal mainline FE gameplay tech into that like a delicious anime turducken.)

Shower Time/Thinking Time (with spoilers if you haven't beat The Last of Us):

Spoiler :

There are some implications that David went crazy because Ellie infected him when she bit him. Though she is immune, she still carries the Cordyceps. If you got a certain pamphlet earlier in the game, it tells you that any exchange of fluids can transmit the fungus, including kissing. Did Ellie just infect her gal pal? Is that going to be the cause of her revenge spree. The earlier teaser implied a female is taken from Ellie, in some fashion. The assumption was that it was her mom, since she's involved, but maybe not.

Yeah, not a great E3 in general. Unless you're a big Microsoft fan. Then it was the best in a while. It's nice to see Microsoft not in the back of the heap, but I would prefer it to be because they knocked it out of the park, and everyone else doing well, too. Oh well.

I'd say Microsoft, Ubi, and Bethesda all had pretty solid events and the rest kinda less so, though everything Nintendo does here will always be a super subjective thing. They're a weird wildcard that exists in their own weird dimension. Like Disney or Apple, they'll always have their core and they deal with relatively little overlap, they don't have to worry about tactical press bullshit in the same way as everyone else, so they're mostly free to just kinda do their thing.

That deepest of deep dives on Smash Brothers was probably way too deep of course. That's a dimension within a dimension. Smash people will vore it up and obsess over every frame of footage for months, but everyone else was probably just reacting the same way as the Giant Bomb folks, or worse, pulling a Tom Servo and yelling END! at the screen.

I can appreciate the batshit insanity of that roster, and it's a cool love letter to all things Nintendo and Nintendo-adjacent. I just have zero interest in how Smash plays.

e: as for other Nintendo stuff, Octopath still looks amazing, and whatever that very Virtual On-ish mech game was in the opener definitely had a mood.

e again: at least the Snake in the new Smash will still be Dave Hayter, as confirmed by the man himself on Twitter.